Thoughts on Man, His Nature, Productions and Discoveries Interspersed with Some Particulars Respecting the Author,
by William Godwin

ESSAY XV.

OF LOVE AND FRIENDSHIP.

Who is it that says, “There is no love but among equals?” Be it who it may, it is a saying universally known, and
that is in every one’s mouth. The contrary is precisely the truth, and is the great secret of every thing that is
admirable in our moral nature.

By love it is my intention here to understand, not a calm, tranquil, and, as it were, half-pronounced feeling, but a
passion of the mind. We may doubtless entertain an approbation of other men, without adverting to the question how they
stand in relation to ourselves, as equals or otherwise. But the sentiment I am here considering, is that where the
person in whom it resides most strongly sympathises with the joys and sorrows of another, desires his gratification,
hopes for his welfare, and shrinks from the anticipation of his being injured; in a word, is the sentiment which has
most the spirit of sacrifice in it, and prepares the person in whom it dwells, to postpone his own advantage to the
advantage of him who is the object of it.

Having placed love among the passions, which is no vehement assumption, I then say, there can be no passion, and by
consequence no love, where there is not imagination. In cases where every thing is understood, and measured, and
reduced to rule, love is out of the question. Whenever this sentiment prevails, I must have my attention fixed more on
the absent than the present, more upon what I do not see than on what I do see. My thoughts will be taken up with the
future or the past, with what is to come or what has been. Of the present there is necessarily no image. Sentiment is
nothing, till you have arrived at a mystery and a veil, something that is seen obscurely, that is just hinted at in the
distance, that has neither certain outline nor colour, but that is left for the mind to fill up according to its
pleasure and in the best manner it is able.

The great model of the affection of love in human beings, is the sentiment which subsists between parents and
children.

Let not this appear a paradox. There is another relation in human society to which this epithet has more
emphatically been given: but, if we analyse the matter strictly, we shall find that all that is most sacred and
beautiful in the passion between the sexes, has relation to offspring. What Milton calls, “The rites mysterious of
connubial love,” would have little charm in them in reflection, to a mind one degree above the brutes, were it not for
the mystery they include, of their tendency to give existence to a new human creature like ourselves. Were it not for
this circumstance, a man and a woman would hardly ever have learned to live together; there scarcely could have been
such a thing as domestic society; but every intercourse of this sort would have been “casual, joyless, unendeared;” and
the propensity would have brought along with it nothing more of beauty, lustre and grace, than the pure animal
appetites of hunger and thirst. Bearing in mind these considerations, I do not therefore hesitate to say, that the
great model of the affection of love in human beings, is the sentiment which subsists between parents and children.

The original feature in this sentiment is the conscious feeling of the protector and the protected. Our passions
cannot subsist in lazy indolence; passion and action must operate on each other; passion must produce action, and
action give strength to the tide of passion. We do not vehemently desire, where we can do nothing. It is in a very
faint way that I entertain a wish to possess the faculty of flying; and an ordinary man can scarcely be said to desire
to be a king or an emperor. None but a madman, of plebeian rank, falls in love with a princess. But shew me a good
thing within my reach; convince me that it is in my power to attain it; demonstrate to me that it is fit for me, and I
am fit for it; then begins the career of passion. In the same manner, I cannot love a person vehemently, and strongly
interest myself in his miscarriages or success, till I feel that I can be something to him. Love cannot dwell in a
state of impotence. To affect and be affected, this is the common nature I require; this is the being that is like unto
myself; all other likeness resides in the logic and the definition, but has nothing to do with feeling or with
practice.

What can be more clear and sound in explanation, than the love of a parent to his child? The affection he bears and
its counterpart are the ornaments of the world, and the spring of every thing that makes life worth having. Whatever
besides has a tendency to illustrate and honour our nature, descends from these, or is copied from these, grows out of
them as the branches of a tree from the trunk, or is formed upon them as a model, and derives from them its shape, its
character, and its soul. Yet there are men so industrious and expert to strip the world we live in of all that adorns
it, that they can see nothing glorious in these affections, but find the one to be all selfishness, and the other all
prejudice and superstition.

The love of the parent to his child is nursed and fostered by two plain considerations; first, that the subject is
capable of receiving much, and secondly, that my power concerning it is great and extensive.

When an infant is presented to my observation, what a wide field of sentiment and reflection is opened to me! Few
minds are industrious and ductile enough completely to compass this field, if the infant is only accidentally brought
under their view. But, if it is an infant with which I begin to be acquainted today, and my acquaintance with which
shall not end perhaps till one of us ceases to exist, how is it possible that the view of its little figure should not
lead me to the meditation of its future history, the successive stages of human life, and the various scenes and
mutations and vicissitudes and fortunes through which it is destined to pass? The Book of Fate lies open before me.
This infant, powerless and almost impassive now, is reserved for many sorrows and many joys, and will one day possess a
power, formidable and fearful to afflict those within its reach, or calculated to diffuse blessings, wisdom, virtue,
happiness, to all around. I conceive all the various destinations of which man is susceptible; my fancy at least is
free to select that which pleases me best; I unfold and pursue it in all its directions, observe the thorns and
difficulties with which it is beset, and conjure up to my thoughts all that it can boast of inviting, delightful and
honourable.

But if the infant that is near to me lays hold of my imagination and affections at the moment in which he falls
under my observation, how much more do I become interested in him, as he advances from year to year! At first, I have
the blessing of the gospel upon me, in that, “having not seen, yet I believe.” But, as his powers expand, I understand
him better. His little eye begins to sparkle with meaning; his tongue tells a tale that may be understood; his very
tones, and gestures, and attitudes, all inform me concerning what he shall be. I am like a florist, who has received a
strange plant from a distant country. At first he sees only the stalk, and the leaves, and the bud having yet no other
colour than that of the leaves. But as he watches his plant from day to day, and from hour to hour, the case which
contains the flower divides, and betrays first one colour and then another, till the shell gradually subsides more and
more towards the stalk, and the figure of the flower begins now to be seen, and its radiance and its pride to expand
itself to the ravished observer. — Every lesson that the child leans, every comment that he makes upon it, every sport
that he pursues, every choice that he exerts, the demeanour that he adopts to his playfellows, the modifications and
character of his little fits of authority or submission, all make him more and more an individual to me, and open a
wider field for my sagacity or my prophecy, as to what he promises to be, and what he may be made.

But what gives, as has already been observed, the point and the finish to all the interest I take respecting him,
lies in the vast power I possess to influence and direct his character and his fortune. At first it is abstract power,
but, when it has already been exerted (as the writers on politics as a science have observed of property), the sweat of
my brow becomes mingled with the apple I have gathered, and my interest is greater. No one understands my views and
projects entirely but myself, and the scheme I have conceived will suffer, if I do not complete it as I began.

And there are men that say, that all this mystery, the most beautiful attitude of human nature, and the crown of its
glory, is pure selfishness!

Let us now turn from the view of the parental, to that of the filial affection.

The great mistake that has been made on this subject, arises from the taking it nakedly and as a mere abstraction.
It has been sagely remarked, that when my father did that which occasioned me to come into existence, he intended me no
benefit, and therefore I owe him no thanks. And the inference which has been made from this wise position is, that the
duty of children to parents is a mere imposture, a trick, employed by the old to defraud the young out of their
services.

I grant most readily, that the mere material ligament that binds together the father and the child, by itself is
worthless, and that he who owes nothing more than this to his father, owes him nothing. The natural, unanimated
relationship is like the grain of mustard-seed in the discourses of Jesus Christ, “which indeed is the least of all
seeds; but, when it is unfolded and grows up, it becomes a mighty tree, so that the birds of the air may come and lodge
in its branches.”

The hard and insensible man may know little of the debt he owes to his father; but he that is capable of calling up
the past, and beholding the things that are not as if they now were, will see the matter in a very different light.
Incalculable are the privations (in a great majority of instances), the toils, the pains, the anxieties, that every
child imposes on his father from the first hour of his existence. If he could know the ceaseless cares, the tender and
ardent feelings, the almost incredible efforts and exertions, that have accompanied him in his father’s breast through
the whole period of his growth, instead of thinking that he owed his parent nothing, he would stand still and wonder
that one human creature could do so much for another.

I grant that all this may be done for a child by a stranger, and that then in one sense the obligation would be
greater. It is however barely possible that all this should be done. The stranger wants the first exciting cause, the
consideration, “This creature by the great scheme of nature belongs to me, and is cast upon my care.” And, as the tie
in the case of the stranger was not complete in the beginning, so neither can it be made so in the sequel. The little
straggler is like the duckling hatched in the nest of a hen; there is danger every day, that as the nursling begins to
be acquainted with its own qualities, it may plunge itself into another element, and swim away from its benefactor.

Even if we put all these considerations out of the question, still the affection of the child to its parent of
adoption, wants the kernel, and, if I may so speak, the soul, of the connection which has been formed and modelled by
the great hand of nature. If the mere circumstance of filiation and descent creates no debt, it however is the
principle of a very close connection. One of the most memorable mysteries of nature, is how, out of the slightest of
all connections (for such, literally speaking, is that between father and child), so many coincidences should arise.
The child resembles his parent in feature, in temperament, in turn of mind, and in class of disposition, while at the
same time in many particulars, in these same respects, he is a new and individual creature. In one view therefore the
child is merely the father multiplied and repeated. Now one of the indefeasible principles of affection is the
partaking of a common nature; and as man is a species by himself, so to a certain degree is every nation and every
family; and this consideration, when added to the moral and spiritual ties already treated of, undoubtedly has a
tendency to give them their zest and perfection.

But even this is not the most agreeable point of view in which we may consider the filial affection. I come back to
my first position, that where there is no imagination, there can be no passion, and by consequence no love. No parent
ever understood his child, and no child ever understood his parent. We have seen that the affectionate parent considers
his child like a flower in the bud, as a mine of power that is to be unfolded, as a creature that is to act and to pass
through he knows not what, as a canvas that “gives ample room and verge enough,” for his prophetic soul to hang over in
endless visions, and his intellectual pencil to fill up with various scenes and fortunes. And, if the parent does not
understand his child, certainly as little does the child understand his parent. Wherever this relation subsists in its
fairest form, the parent is as a God, a being qualified with supernatural powers, to his offspring. The child consults
his father as an oracle; to him he proposes all his little questions; from him he learns his natural philosophy, his
morals, his rules of conduct, his religion, and his creed. The boy is uninformed on every point; and the father is a
vast Encyclopedia, not merely of sciences, but of feelings, of sagacity, of practical wisdom, and of justice, which the
son consults on all occasions, and never consults in vain. Senseless and inexpert is that parent, who endeavours to
govern the mind by authority, and to lay down rugged and peremptory dogmas to his child; the child is fully and
unavoidably prepared to receive every thing with unbounded deference, and to place total reliance in the oracle which
nature has assigned him. Habits, how beautiful! Inestimable benefit of nature, that has given me a prop against which
to sustain my unripened strength, and has not turned me loose to wander with tottering steps amidst the vast desert of
society!

But it is not merely for contemplative wisdom that the child honours his parent; he sees in him a vast fund of love,
attachment and sympathy. That he cannot mistake; and it is all a mystery to him. He says, What am I, that I should be
the object of this? and whence comes it? He sees neither the fountain from which it springs, nor the banks that confine
it. To him it is an ocean, unfathomable, and without a shore.

To the bounty of its operations he trusts implicitly. The stores of judgment and knowledge he finds in his father,
prompt him to trust it. In many instances where it appeared at first obscure and enigmatical, the event has taught him
to acknowledge its soundness. The mutinousness of passion will sometimes excite a child to question the decrees of his
parent; it is very long before his understanding, as such, comes to set up a separate system, and teaches him to
controvert the decisions of his father.

Perhaps I ought earlier to have stated, that the filial connection we have here to consider, does not include those
melancholy instances where some woful defect or utter worthlessness in the parent counteracts the natural course of the
affections, but refers only to cases, where the character of father is on the whole sustained with honour, and the
principle of the connection is left to its true operation. In such cases the child not only observes for himself the
manifestations of wisdom and goodness in his parent, but is also accustomed to hear well of him from all around. There
is a generous conspiracy in human nature, not to counteract the honour borne by the offspring to him from whom he
sprung, and the wholsome principle of superiority and dependence which is almost indispensible between persons of
different ages dwelling under the same roof. And, exclusively of this consideration, the men who are chiefly seen by
the son are his father’s friends and associates; and it is the very bent, and, as it were, law of our nature, that we
do not associate much, but with persons whom we favour, and who are prepared to mention us with kindness and
honour.

Thus every way the child is deeply imbued with veneration for his parent, and forms the habit of regarding him as
his book of wisdom, his philosopher and guide. He is accustomed to hear him spoken of as a true friend, an active ally,
and a pattern of justice and honour; and he finds him so. Now these are the true objects of affection — wisdom and
beneficence; and the human heart loves this beneficence better when it is exercised towards him who loves, first,
because inevitably in almost all instances we are best pleased with the good that is done to ourselves, and secondly,
because it can scarcely happen but that we in that case understand it best, both in its operation and its effects.

The active principles of religion are all moulded upon this familiar and sensible relation of father and child: and
to understand whet the human heart is capable to conceive on this subject, we have only to refer to the many eloquent
and glowing treatises that have been written upon the love of God to his creatures, and the love that the creature in
return owes to his God. I am not now considering religion in a speculative point of view, or enquiring among the
different sects and systems of religion what it is that is true; but merely producing religion as an example of what
have been the conceptions of the human mind in successive ages of the world on the subject of love.

This All that we behold, the immensity of the universe, the admirable harmony and subtlety of its structure, as they
appear in the vastest and the minutest bodies, is considered by religion, as the emanation of pure love, a mighty
impulse and ardour in its great author to realise the idea existing in his mind, and to produce happiness. The
Providence that watches over us, so that not a sparrow dies unmarked, and that “the great Sensorium of the world
vibrates, if a hair of our head but falls to the ground in the remotest desert of his creation,” is still unremitted,
never-satiated love. And, to go from this to the peculiarities of the Christian doctrine, “Greater love hath no man
than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends: God so loved the world, that he gave his only-begotten Son to
suffer, to be treated contumeliously, and to die with ignominy, that we might live.”

If on the other hand we consider the love which the creature must naturally pay to his creator, we shall find that
the affection we can suppose the most ingenuous child to bear to the worthiest parent, is a very faint image of the
passion which may be expected to grow out of this relation. In God, as he is represented to us in the books of the
worthiest divines, is every thing that can command love; wisdom to conceive, power to execute, and beneficence actually
to carry into effect, whatever is excellent and admirable. We are lost in contemplating the depth and immensity of his
perfections. “Every good and every perfect gift is from the universal Father, with whom is no variableness, neither
shadow of turning.” The most soothing and gratifying of all sentiments, is that of entire confidence in the divine
goodness, a reliance which no adversity can shake, and which supports him that entertains it under every calamity, that
sees the finger of God in every thing that comes to pass, that says, “It is good for me to be afflicted,” believes,
that “all things work together for blessings” to the pious and the just, and is intimately persuaded that “our light
affliction, which is but for a moment, is the means and the earnest of a far more exceeding and eternal weight of
glory.”

If we descend from these great archetypes, the love between parent and child, and between the creator and his
creature, we shall still find the same inequality the inseparable attendant upon the most perfect ties of affection.
The ancients seem to have conceived the truest and most exalted ideas on the subject of friendship. Among the most
celebrated instances are the friendship of Achilles and Patroclus, Orestes and Pylades, Aeneas and Achates, Cyrus and
Araspes, Alexander and Hephaestion, Scipio and Laelius. In each of these the parties are, the true hero, the man of
lofty ambition, the magnificent personage in whom is concentred every thing that the historian or the poet was able to
realise of excellence, and the modest and unpretending individual in whom his confidence was reposed. The grand secret
of the connection is unfolded in the saying of the Macedonian conqueror, “Craterus loves the king, but Hephaestion
loves Alexander.” Friendship is to the loftier mind the repose, the unbending of the soul. The great man (whatever may
be the department in which his excellence consists) has enough of his greatness, when he stands before the world, and
receives the homage that is paid to his merits. Ever and anon he is anxious to throw aside this incumbrance, and be as
a man merely to a man. He wishes to forget the “pride, pomp, and circumstance” of greatness, and to be that only which
he is himself. He desires at length to be sure, that he receives no adulation, that he is accosted with no insincerity,
and that the individual to whose society he has thought proper to withdraw, has no by-ends, no sinister purposes in all
his thoughts. What he seeks for, is a true friend, a being who sincerely loves, one who is attached to him, not for the
accidents that attend him, hut for what most strictly belongs to him, and of which he cannot be divested. In this
friend there is neither interested intention nor rivalry.

Such are the characteristic features of the superior party in these exemplars of friendship among the ancients. Of
the unpretending, unassuming party Homer, the great master of the affections and emotions in remoter ages, has given us
the fullest portrait in the character of Patroclus. The distinguishing feature of his disposition is a melting and
affectionate spirit, the concentred essence of tenderness and humanity. When Patroclus comes from witnessing the
disasters of the Greeks, to collect a report of which he had been sent by Achilles, he is “overwhelmed with floods of
tears, like a spring which pours down its waters from the steep edge of a precipice.” It is thus that Jupiter
characterises him when he lies dead in the field of battle:

Thou [addressing himself in his thoughts to Hector] hast slain the friend of Achilles, not less memorable for the
blandness of his temper, than the bravery of his deeds.

It is thus that Menelaus undertakes to excite the Grecian chiefs to rescue his body:

Let each man recollect the sweetness of his disposition for, as long as he lived, he was unremitted in kindness to
all. When Achilles proposes the games at the funeral, he says, “On any other occasion my horses should have started for
the prize, but now it cannot be. They have lost their incomparable groom, who was accustomed to refresh their limbs
with water, and anoint their flowing manes; and they are inconsolable.” Briseis also makes her appearance among the
mourners, avowing that, “when her husband had been slain in battle, and her native city laid in ashes, this generous
man prevented her tears, averring to her, that she should be the wife of her conqueror, and that he would himself
spread the nuptial banquet for her in the hero’s native kingdom of Phthia.”

The reciprocity which belongs to a friendship between unequals may well be expected to give a higher zest to their
union. Each party is necessary to the other. The superior considers him towards whom he pours out his affection, as a
part of himself.

The head is not more native to the heart,
The hand more instrumental to the mouth.

He cannot separate himself from him, but at the cost of a fearful maim. When the world is shut out by him, when he
retires into solitude, and falls back upon himself, then his unpretending friend is most of all necessary to him. He is
his consolation and his pleasure, the safe coffer in which he reposits all his anxieties and sorrows. If the principal,
instead of being a public man, is a man of science, this kind of unbending becomes certainly not the less welcome to
him. He wishes occasionally to forget the severity of his investigations, neither to have his mind any longer wound up
and stretched to the height of meditation, nor to feel that he needs to be any way on his guard, or not completely to
give the rein to all his sallies and the sportiveness of his soul. Having been for a considerable time shut up in
sequestered reflection, he wishes, it may be, to have the world, the busy impassioned world, brought to his ears,
without his being obliged to enter into its formalities and mummeries. If he desires to speak of the topics which had
so deeply engaged him, he can keep as near the edge as he pleases, and drop or resume them as his fancy may prompt. And
it seems useless to say, how much his modest and unassuming friend will be gratified in being instrumental to relieve
the labours of his principal, in feeling that he is necessary to him, and in meditating on the delight he receives in
being made the chosen companion and confident of him whom he so ardently admires. It was precisely in this spirit, that
Fulke Greville, two hundred years ago, directed that it should be inscribed on his tomb, “Here lies the friend of Sir
Philip Sidney.” Tenderness on the one part, and a deep feeling of honour and respect on the other, give a completeness
to the union which it must otherwise for ever want. “There is no limit, none,” to the fervour with which the stronger
goes forward to protect the weak; while in return the less powerful would encounter a thousand deaths rather than
injury should befall the being to whom in generosity and affection he owes so much.

In the mean time, though inequality is necessary to give this completeness to friendship, the inequality must not be
too great.

The inferior party must be able to understand and appreciate the sense and the merits of him to whom he is thus
bound. There must be no impediment to hinder the communications of the principal from being fully comprehended, and his
sentiments entirely participated. There must be a boundless confidence, without apprehension that the power of the
stronger party can by the remotest possibility be put forth ungenerously. “Perfect love casteth out fear.” The
evangelist applies this aphorism even to the love of the creature to his creator. “The Lord spake unto Moses, face to
face, as a man speaketh unto his friend.” In the union of which I am treating the demonstrative and ordinary appearance
will be that of entire equality, which is heightened by the inner, and for the greater part unexplained and
undeveloped, impression of a contrary nature. There is in either party a perfect reliance, an idea of inequality with
the most entire assurance that it can never operate unworthily in the stronger party, or produce insincerity or
servility in the weaker. There will in reality always be some reserve, some shadow of fear between equals, which in the
friendship of unequals, if happily assorted, can find no place. There is a pouring out of the heart on the one side,
and a cordial acceptance on the other, which words are inadequate to describe.

To proceed. If from friendship we go forward to that which in all languages is emphatically called love, we shall
still find ourselves dogged and attended by inequality. Nothing can be more certain, however we may seek to modify and
abate it, than the inequality of the sexes. Let us attend to it as it stands in Milton:

For contemplation he and velour formed
For softness she and sweet attractive grace;
He for God only, she for God in him.

Thus it is painted to us as having been in Paradise; and with similar inequality have the sexes subsisted in all
ages and nations since. If it were possible to take from the fair sex its softness and attractive grace, and endow it
instead with audacious, masculine and military qualities, there is scarcely any one that does not perceive, with
whatever advantages it might be attended in other respects, that it would be far from tending to cherish and increase
the passion of love.

It is in reality obvious, that man and woman, as they come from the hands of nature, are so much upon a par with
each other, as not to afford the best subjects between whom to graft a habit of entire, unalterable affection. In the
scenes of vulgar and ordinary society, a permanent connection between persons of opposite sexes is too apt to
degenerate into a scene of warfare, where each party is for ever engaged in a struggle for superiority, and neither
will give way. A penetrating observer, with whom in former days I used intimately to converse, was accustomed to say,
that there was generally more jarring and ill blood between the two parties in the first year of their marriage, than
during all the remainder of their lives. It is at length found necessary, as between equally matched belligerents on
the theatre of history, that they should come to terms, make a treaty of peace, or at least settle certain laws of
warfare, that they may not waste their strength in idle hostilities.

The nations of antiquity had a way of settling this question in a very summary mode. As certain Oriental tribes have
determined that women have no souls, and that nothing can be more proper than to shut them up, like singing birds in
cages, so the Greeks and Romans for the most part excluded their females from the society of the more martial sex.
Marriage with them was a convenience merely; and the husband and wife were in reality nothing more than the master and
the slave. This point once settled as a matter of national law, there was certainly in most cases little danger of any
vexatious rivalship and struggle for power.

But there is nothing in which the superiority of modern times over the ancient has been more conspicuous, than in
our sentiments and practices on this subject. This superiority, as well as several other of our most valuable
acquisitions, took its rise in what we call the dark ages. Chivalry was for the most part the invention of the eleventh
century. Its principle was built upon a theory of the sexes, giving to each a relative importance, and assigning to
both functions full of honour and grace. The knights (and every gentleman during that period in due time became a
knight) were taught, as the main features of their vocation, the “love of God and the ladies.” The ladies in return
were regarded as the genuine censors of the deeds of knighthood. From these principles arose a thousand lessons of
humanity. The ladies regarded it as their glory to assist their champions to arm and to disarm, to perform for them
even menial services, to attend them in sickness, and to dress their wounds. They bestowed on them their colours, and
sent them forth to the field hallowed with their benedictions. The knights on the other hand considered any slight
towards the fair sex as an indelible stain to their order; they contemplated the graceful patronesses of their valour
with a feeling that partook of religious homage and veneration, and esteemed it as perhaps the first duty of their
profession, to relieve the wrongs, and avenge the injuries of the less powerful sex.

This simple outline as to the relative position of the one sex and the other, gave a new face to the whole scheme
and arrangements of civil society. It is like those admirable principles in the order of the material universe, or
those grand discoveries brought to light from time to time by superior genius, so obvious and simple, that we wonder
the most common understanding could have missed them, yet so pregnant with results, that they seem at once to put a new
life and inspire a new character into every part of a mighty and all-comprehensive mass.

The passion between the sexes, in its grosser sense, is a momentary impulse merely; and there was danger that, when
the fit and violence of the passion was over, the whole would subside into inconstancy and a roving disposition, or at
least into indifference and almost brutal neglect. But the institutions of chivalry immediately gave a new face to
this. Either sex conceived a deep and permanent interest in the other. In the unsettled state of society which
characterised the period when these institutions arose, the defenceless were liable to assaults of multiplied kinds,
and the fair perpetually stood in need of a protector and a champion. The knights on the other hand were taught to
derive their fame and their honour from the suffrages of the ladies. Each sex stood in need of the other; and the basis
of their union was mutual esteem.

The effect of this was to give a hue of imagination to all their intercourse. A man was no longer merely a man, nor
a woman merely a woman. They were taught mutual deference. The woman regarded her protector as something illustrious
and admirable; and the man considered the smiles and approbation of beauty as the adequate reward of his toils and his
dangers. These modes of thinking introduced a nameless grace into all the commerce of society. It was the poetry of
life. Hence originated the delightful narratives and fictions of romance; and human existence was no longer the bare,
naked train of vulgar incidents, which for so many ages of the world it had been accustomed to be. It was clothed in
resplendent hues, and wore all the tints of the rainbow. Equality fled and was no more; and love, almighty, perdurable
love, came to supply its place.

By means of this state of things the vulgar impulse of the sexes towards each other, which alone was known to the
former ages of the world, was transformed into somewhat of a totally different nature. It became a kind of worship. The
fair sex looked upon their protectors, their fathers, their husbands, and the whole train of their chivalry, as
something more than human. There was a grace in their motions, a gallantry in their bearing, and a generosity in their
spirit of enterprise, that the softness of the female heart found irresistible. Nor less on the other hand did the
knights regard the sex to whose service and defence they were sworn, as the objects of their perpetual deference. They
approached them with a sort of gallant timidity, listened to their behests with submission, and thought the longest
courtship and devotion nobly recompensed by the final acceptance of the fair.

The romance and exaggeration characteristic of these modes of thinking have gradually worn away in modern times; but
much of what was most valuable in them has remained. Love has in later ages never been divested of the tenderness and
consideration, which were thus rendered some of its most estimable features. A certain desire in each party to exalt
the other, and regard it as worthy of admiration, became inextricably interwoven with the simple passion. A sense of
the honour that was borne by the one to the other, had the happiest effect in qualifying the familiarity and unreserve
in the communion of feelings and sentiments, without which the attachment of the sexes cannot subsist. It is something
like what the mystic divines describe of the beatific vision, where entire wonder and adoration are not judged to be
incompatible with the most ardent affection, and all meaner and selfish regards are annihilated.

From what has been thus drawn together and recapitulated it seems clearly to follow, as was stated in the beginning,
that love cannot exist in its purest form and with a genuine ardour, where the parties are, and are felt by each other
to be, on an equality; but that in all cases it is requisite there should be a mutual deference and submission,
agreeably to the apostolic precept, “Likewise all of you be subject one to the other.” There must be room for the
imagination to exercise its powers; we must conceive and apprehend a thousand things which we do not actually witness;
each party must feel that it stands in need of the other, and without the other cannot be complete; each party must be
alike conscious of the power of receiving and conferring benefit; and there must be the anticipation of a distant
future, that may every day enhance the good to be imparted and enjoyed, and cause the individuals thus united
perpetually to become more sensible of the fortunate event which gave them to each other, and has thus entailed upon
each a thousand advantages in which they could otherwise never have shared.